Research

This are the generic research lines addressed by the members of the NIL group:

Computational Creativity: This research line explores the possibilities of harnessing the power of computers to address tasks considered creative when carried out by humans.

Generating Language Output: This line addresses the task of generating natural and fluent text output from information expressed conceptually in some manner other than text (computational knowledge representations, spread sheets, logs,...). Some of the particular applications that have been handled so far include verbal instructions, stories, descriptions for locations served on mobile devices...)

The Story Telling Laboratory: The Story Telling Laboratory+ is a research initiative that brings together ongoing projects that study various areas related to stories: how they are constructed, how they can be explored in an interactive manner, how they are converted into text or video, how their texts are read out aloud in a convincing manner, how they can be rendered as verse...

NLP for Accessibility: we are working on applying natural language processing technologies to improve access to information for people with disabilities of various kinds. This includes text simplification for people with reading difficulties, pictogram to text conversion for user of augmented and adaptative communication systems, and generating of specific verbal instructions for blind people.

Processing Language Input: Concerns all the process that take text as an input and either add a significant level of information that was not previously explicit (syntactic structure, emotional connotation...) or provide the means for manipulating the text in an intelligent manner (summarise, categorise, personalise...).

Modeling Aspects of Interaction: Interaction involves much more than understanding the meaning of a text or speech input and being able of generating a text output for a given information. This research line addresses some of the additional issues involved in interaction that have been considered relevant for the applications developed by the group over its history. These range from the abstract representation of emotions, interactive narrative, language interaction in 3D environment...

Resource Building: Natural language processing is a knowledge-hungry process. Most approaches involve the use of knowledge resources of various kinds (grammars, lexicons, corpora, ontologies, evaluation collections...). This research line of the group originally started to provide the necessary support for the others and developed into an independent endeavour.

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